The news that some American states want to ban electronic cigarettes and the practice known as "vaping" is the latest illustration of what has become a moral crusade against smokers.

The dangers of smoking are not in dispute. Those of secondary or passive smoking are rather more contentious, even though they form the basis of the smoking bans. Now anti-smoking activists condemn third-hand smoking – the supposed dangers of smelling the clothes of someone who has recently smoked; and even fourth-hand smoking – the idea that contact with a non-smoker who has had contact with a smoker is dangerous. At the same time, these activists push for images of cigarettes in films and cartoons to be expunged and for cigarette packets to be hidden from public view.

The aim of this activism is, as the UK's former chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson revealed in 2007, the "complete denormalisation of smoking". What a splendidly Orwellian notion that is, and he is at least half-way to reaching his goal. Apart from the smoking ban, in recent months I have been accosted a few times in the street by people objecting to me smoking and on one occasion spat at for doing so. I know from conversations with other smokers that this is not unusual.

You will see in the thread below vitriolic comments about smokers being disgusting, revolting, even sub-human; for smokers are now fair game for just about any sort of abuse. Others will couch their objections in sober-sounding claims about cost: what of the £2.7bn that smoking costs the NHS each year? Well, yes, but what about the £9bn that tobacco tax raises each year?

To all but the most zealous anti-smoker, it is obvious that there is much more going on here than a concern with public health, but what? There are two answers, one historical, the other contemporary. Historically, moral disdain for smoking long predates any issues of health. To give just a couple of examples: Murad the Cruel, ruler of the Ottoman Empire 1623-1640, had at least 25,000 suspected smokers put to death, while at about the same time in Persia those caught selling tobacco had molten lead poured down their throats; and in the 1920s employees of the Ford Motor Company were subjected to night-time raids on their homes to check whether they were smoking – if so they had their wages docked or in some cases were sacked.

Nor are smoking bans new: some German, Italian and American states had them in the mid-19th century. The more contemporary hatred of smoking stems in part from its equation with death at a time of secularism. Given widespread acceptance that there is no afterlife, there seems to be a kind of fantasy that if only one does the right things, then death can be abolished at least for long enough until a cure is found. Smokers are an affront to this fantasy, and that is why no condemnation is strong enough for their presumption.

The main objection to the demonisation of smoking has come from liberals who insist that it is a matter of individual rights. That is why the crucial claim of the anti-smokers is that of passive smoking: your right to smoke ends at my nose, they say, and liberals have been comprehensively wrong-footed by this. In fact, it exposes the limits of liberalism since the reality is that all individual actions impact on others in some way, and the issue with respect to smoking is the extent of this impact relative to other actions. Does your right to wear perfume end at my nose? Does your right to drive a car? By insisting on the primacy of individual rights in the abstract, liberals have simply opened up the most fruitful terrain for the anti-smokers: what about my rights?

The more important argument should be cultural. Throughout the 20th century smoking became a cultural norm in many countries. Cigarettes were distributed to servicemen during both world wars, and were regarded by the allies (although not, famously, by the Nazis) as vital to morale. Even now, no small minority, something like a quarter, of the UK population smokes, rising to much higher proportions among the working class. This culture of smoking may be irrational and ill-informed, but why should it be squashed rather than accommodated?

Well, the anti-smoking lobby will say, because it is bad for your health. But why should a culture of health trump one of pleasure or at least comfort? And why, if health is really the issue, should alternative forms of nicotine ingestion, such as vaping, be banned? Unless, of course, health is not really what is at issue at all, and smokers have become an acceptable scapegoat for the moralistic impulses of all societies and the death-denial peculiar to our own.